Political Hay

In Defense of Hillary, Comey, Schumer, and Pelosi

As Joseph told his brothers, evil acts have a way of producing good.

Joseph

A great many Americans know the compelling story of Joseph and his brothers. Some know it well from their childhood Bible studies in synagogue, yeshiva, church, religious school — or even having had parents read Bible passages to them every night or weekend when they were growing up. Even more know the story presumably from an Andrew Lloyd Weber Broadway musical. And even more Americans than those in the above groups probably would ask Jesse Watters, “Isn’t that the guy who got the raincoat?” Regardless…

There is a powerful underlying theme in that Torah narrative. Joseph’s brothers fear that he is a false prophet, and they sell him into slavery. In short order, he ends up incarcerated in an Egyptian prison with perhaps no hope left for freedom. While locked up, he meets two artisans who have dreamt the identical dream, interprets the imagery they describe, and predicts what will unfold. His prophecies rapidly come true: The wine steward, as predicted, is restored to the Pharaoh’s service, and the baker is hanged. Two years later, the Pharaoh (whom most Americans associate with Elvis, thanks to the musical) himself dreams two disturbing visions, and no one can interpret the dreams convincingly. At Pharaoh’s side, his now-trusted wine steward tells him that there is some Jew in the lock-up who is the greatest expert dream interpreter, and Pharaoh has Joseph cleaned up and brought out.

Joseph predicts that a terrible famine will be coming after the immediately forthcoming seven years of plenty, and the Pharaoh is so impressed by how the prognostication fits the dreams that he elevates Joseph to Viceroy, the second highest government position in the empire. By nine years later, with the second year of famine now devastating the region and people dying of hunger, people all over the Middle East flock to Egypt, desperately begging Joseph for food. Among the supplicants, Joseph’s brothers come down to Egypt to beg. After a few songs in the style of Maurice Chevalier and Reggae, Joseph saves their lives by personally ordering that they be supplied with an abundance of life-saving food. Years later, when the patriarch Jacob passes away, the brothers fear that, now that Dad is gone, the all-powerful Viceroy Joseph will take revenge on them for selling him into slavery four decades earlier. Dad will not be there to protect them. But Joseph reassures them in approximately these words: “Fear not. I am not G-d Who judges. And, besides, you sold me into slavery because you wanted to harm me. You meant it for evil. But G-d meant it all for the good, so that I miraculously would be positioned uniquely to save a whole bunch of people — including our entire family.” (Gen. 50:19-20) You meant it for evil, but G-d meant it for good.

I come not to bury Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi but to praise them.

Hillary

Every established pundit predicted that Donald Trump never would win the Republican nomination for President in 2016 — and, if he somehow would win the nomination by miracle, he would get clobbered in the general election. The Year 2016 was Hillary’s turn. She had waited in Arkansas, watching her huckster husband serve as governor, even as he serviced some of the locals. That made her the state’s First Lady. She practiced law at a firm where billing records got lost conveniently during criminal investigations into defalcations. With her husband earning less than any other American governor ($35,000 a year), she invested $1,000 in cattle futures and made $100,000 — a return whose odds, if her trading instead had been honest, would be one in 31 trillion. In time, the Comeback Kid got elected President, and she moved with him to the White House, kind-of like the Clampetts. She then finagled throughout the ensuing eight years, messed up healthcare legislation so badly that the 1994 Republicans recaptured Congress for the first time in forty years, and she even took the American people’s furniture with her to New York when her two terms were up.

Having moved to liberal Democrat New York, she easily got elected United States Senator based on the above résumé — plus other extras in her curriculum vitae: Travelgate, having arrived in Bosnia under gunfire, having been named for Sir Edmund Hillary, and so many other falsifications that she burned out the batteries on the lie detectors. In other words, she had no qualifications other than having been married to a President. Truly the personification of a woman achieving equal status based on her own merits.

Next it was her time to be President in 2008, so she and the Comeback Kid changed Democrat primary rules to give enhanced influence to “caucuses” over straight-out fair voting. In a caucus, people have to hang around for hours to be counted, and that process always gives a disproportionate advantage to the candidate whose supporters are most passionate and energized. Because we never before had a woman President, the Clintons expected that the new caucuses would play to her advantage, revving up excitement — Wow, a Woman President! Alas, she did not anticipate Barack Obama — Wow, a Black President! — and she lost.

Obama made her his Secretary of State not because she had any particular foreign-affairs experience. Indeed, she and her husband had been focused mostly on his domestic affairs — Gennifer Flowers, Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Monica Lewinsky. But Obama had a greater purpose, actually quite clever: By making her Secretary of State, he basically got her out of the country for several years. Her service in State was utterly undistinguished. The reset with Russia was a joke. She messed up Middle East talks and screamed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone for half an hour. As we look back, there is no Clinton Doctrine to remember, no accomplishments — not even too many bad ones. It would seem that most of her time was spent learning how to text and planning for a wedding that required 33,000 emails. And of course she oversaw our relations with Libya and Benghazi.

Finally, 2016 finally, finally was her time to be President. It finally was her turn. But even more than her email scandal, more than her “Weekend at Bernie’s” collapse at that curb and being stuffed into that car on 9/11, her forgetting to campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin, and her remarkable gaffe calling half the country she would lead “a basketful of Deplorables,” there was one overriding reason she lost: By and large, objectively, Hillary Clinton is despised. People just do not like her. She is phony. Her laugh is phony. Her pledges are phony. Her assertion that she stands for women’s rights is most phony: As an attorney, she helped a child molester and rapist get off light and then giggled about it as she remembered it years later. Her “Faith Advisor” (nice job if you can get it!) sent her two or three Biblical passages a day (“And the L-rd spoke to Moses, saying”), and otherwise harassed women — and she dealt with his physical batteries against women by reassigning thewoman who complained. And what verses did the Faith Advisor send her as she infamously coordinated character assassinations of the women whom her husband sexually abused? “And the L-rd spoke to Moses, saying”?

It is more than a year since the election of Donald Trump. Do not underestimate all the pundits who said that a seasoned Democrat would have defeated Donald Trump. Looking back, one of the greatest blessings, even a miracle, that ever unfolded for American conservatives — who desperately needed to recapture the White House, drain the swamp, and reverse Obama’s eight years of tyrannical executive orders and the corruption in his “Justice” Department and Eric Holder (“Fast and Furious”) and Loretta Lynch (tarmac discussions about the grandchildren) and Bruce Ohr and Nellie Ohr, Obama’s FBI (Strzok and Page and McCabe and all the others), their abuse of the FISA court, his IRS and Lois Lerner, his Department of Energy, his Department of Education, his immigration mess — was the miracle that Hillary was the Democrats’ candidate against Trump. She was that hated.

Be grateful every day that Hillary Clinton, in service to her country, ran as the Democrats’ standard bearer in 2016.

Comey

Hillary Clinton perpetrated federal crimes by removing top secret Government documents and records from secure sites. Although most bathrooms in most homes are private, her server in her bathroom did not meet the federal standard. At the very least, her gross negligence in handling the 33,000 yoga and wedding dress emails should have prompted FBI Director James Comey to urge the convening of a grand jury. If the “fix” had not been in for Clinton even months before Comey’s “investigation” had begun, the FBI would not have given her associates promises of immunity without something in return, and she would have been compelled to speak to the FBI under oath, exposing her to further prosecution for perjury, exactly as the FBI later did to Michael Flynn.

But pause a moment and think: What if Comey had been honest? If Comey had been honest, Clinton would have been tied up with a grand jury, probably indicted, and would have been making inquiries of Obama whether any remaining White House furniture would fit in a prison cell. With Hillary then being removed from the Presidential campaign midway through the election cycle, Vice President Joe Biden ultimately would have been drafted to run against Donald Trump. Conservatives do not like Joe Biden’s politics and mock his gaffes, but Joe Biden very possibly would have won the election. Biden is one of the nicest, most lovable public figures around. Again, go and hate his politics, his meandering lies about Republicans wanting blacks to be back in chains, his declaration at the Democrat convention that ISIS had been destroyed, but the man, as a person, is a very likable guy. He really is a nice guy, one of the nicest public figures in Washington. Moreover, he has a compelling story about personal tragedy he has faced and overcome, and that story had just been amplified when his beloved and gifted son passed away.

If Comey had been honest, Hillary now would be in a striped orange pantsuit, bleaching emails and planning weddings, and Joe Biden would be President of the United States. Be grateful every day that James Comey, in service to his country, manipulated justice so that Hillary would remain the Democrats’ candidate against Donald Trump.

Schumer

With President Trump elected, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, supposedly a moderate, allowed himself to get pulled into leading “The Resistance.” In his role, he effectively has forced Democrats in the Senate to oppose everything President Trump has initiated. He has pursued the cynical defamation that Donald Trump colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. Had Schumer not done so, the American people never would have discovered Obamagate — the extent of corruption existing at the highest echelons of the Obama “Justice” Department and the FBI. Had Schumer not been so determined to resist any reasonable deal-making with the President, he never would have forced each and every Democrat United States Senator to vote against the Trump tax cuts and tax-reform package. But Schumer whipped his senators into line and forced them to resist.

Now Claire McCaskill (Missouri), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Jon Tester (Montana), Bill Nelson (Florida), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Joe Donnelly (Indiana), and other Democrats up for reelection in pro-Trump conservative states have to explain why they voted against the tax cuts that have put substantial bonuses, wage increases, enhanced benefits packages, and reduced federal withholding into the pockets of tens of millions of Americans, even as billions are being repatriated to the United States, new investment is booming, and the economy is defying the usual cyclical expectation that a recovery has run its course.

If Schumer had been just a bit more reasonable, Democrats seeking reelection this November would be much more competitively positioned. Be grateful every day that Chuck Schumer, in service to his country, has led the Senate Democrats in a Resistance that will topple Democrat incumbents who otherwise would have been better situated to win.

Pelosi

Pray for her every day. Pray for her health, her sustenance, her strength. Pray that her voice remains strong so that she can speak into microphones daily. Pray that her hands remain steady so that she can sit on them for ninety minutes while a President reports to the nation that the economy is robust, that black unemployment is at its lowest level ever recorded, that the flag waves majestically, that criminal gangs comprised of Illegal Immigrants are being thrown out of the country. Pray that she continues that thing where she seems to suck her own face. And pray that she continues telling Americans that the thousand-dollar bonuses they have been given by their employers are “crumbs,” that their wage hikes are crumbs, that their increased take-home pay is crumbs. Nearly 70 percent of all American households have less than $1,000 in life savings. Pelosi’s net worth is between $20 million and $120 million. As roles have reversed and the Republicans have become the party of common hard-working families while Democrats have become the party of the billionaires — the likes of Buffett, Bezos, Soros, and the billionaires in Silicon Valley and Wall Street — pray daily that Nancy Pelosi remains strong and at least semi-coherent.

As the Obamagate Scandal now exposes truth and light on sordid corruption at the highest echelons of America’s law-enforcement apparatus, a corruption that is reminiscent of how Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler both manipulated their respective secret police services to spy on and destroy their political opponents, I am grateful for the four unsung heroes in this musical: Crooked Hillary, James Comey, Schumer, and Pelosi. Each of them has acted with the secret intent to do evil, and machinations of each have proven instead to be the blessings that give us a chance to recover our country, our national culture, and restore an America that we came very close to losing on the eve of 2016.